As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an Information Handling System (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as supporting cloud services, financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, global communications, etc. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
In some cases, IHSs may be comprised of rack components where the rack components may each be housed within a chassis or enclosure and the chassis may be stacked within a rack. A rack may be a framed structure that is often capable of providing shared power, cooling, networking, and/or management infrastructure to one or more chassis. Examples of rack components that can be housed within chassis include, but are not limited to, input/output (I/O) modules, storage devices, and network cards. In rack-mounted applications, rack components housed within a chassis are plugged into the front of the rack and external connections to the individual rack components are made from the back of the rack. Each rack component may include a backplane printed circuit assembly that has connections for the various inputs and outputs. In certain rack-mounted IHSs, some of the rack components are rack servers that include multiple drive bays, in which storage devices can be inserted and connected to the backplane. In certain configurations, an individual storage device can be plugged into each of the drive bays in implementing various data storage solutions.
The storage devices supported by a rack server may include both magnetic storage media devices and solid-state storage devices. In such rack servers, the drive bays may be configured to each support multiple different types of storage devices. Depending on the application, users can determine whether to utilize the type of storage device to be used in each drive bay of the rack server. In some scenarios, solid-state storage devices may be desirable due to reduced latency when compared to magnetic storage devices. In order to benefit from the reduced latency of solid-state storage devices, IHSs may use the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus standard to interface with the solid-state storage devices. A PCIe bus connection may be comprised of lanes, where each lane consists of two differential pairs of signaling wires. One of the differential pairs of each lane is used for transmission of PCIe data and the other differential pair is used for receiving PCIe data. PCIe supports the linking of multiple lanes into higher bandwidth connections. One aspect of PCIe supporting the linking of multiple lanes is that linked lanes must be consecutively ordered lanes within the PCIe bus connection.